Foucault on Phobie d’État and Neoliberalism*
Duncan Kelly
Michel Foucault’s predominant approach to his various subjects of inquiry and their discourses seems in retrospect to have been heading toward a form of genealogy, well before he even adopted the terminology. Indeed, the “self-consciously” Nietzschean qualities of even his first book are highlighted by the editors of his newly assembled Oeuvres.1 The idea of a dramatic shift, however, or obvious moment of transition toward this, or indeed to anything else in his work, overplays the extent to which his thought can itself be classified into various stages or moments of rupture. Though he often took himself to be writing about the challenge of moments of discontinuity in modern forms of economic knowledge, or the classificatory dynamics of modern liberal states, or the evolution from baroque theatrical punishment to modern techniques of incarceration, he knew that such transitions were never so clean and precise as our language would have us believe. As he suggested in 1979, when writing most explicitly of the relationship between biopolitics and neoliberalism, “the point of all these investigations concerning madness, disease, delinquency, sexuality, and what I am talking about now,” that is, neoliberalism as forms or practices of power based on the idea of not governing too much while maximizing national prosperity, is “to show how the coupling of a set of practices and a regime of truth forms a dispositif of knowledge-power that effectively marks out in reality that which does not exist and legitimately submits it to the division between true and false.”2 How these particular couplings came to be elaborated into Foucault’s contemporary analysis of neoliberalism and his worries about contemporary politics and political theory, alongside his rejection of contemporary Marxism, is the subject of my essay.
For Foucault’s genealogies were intellectually bound up with an understanding of the competition between different dispositifs in public, as well as being shaped by a very personal sense of what philosophical approaches to the histories of these various forms of power-knowledge could conceivably achieve. His interest in this was therefore both exquisitely direct, because for Foucault the very fact that histories were put into written form by particular authors made all history-writing part of the wider history of self-writing and self-constitution, but also ornately distant. His sense of genealogy as self-writing meant more than simply autobiography in these terms, but it presumed an engagement with the “already known” and the “particularity of circumstances that determine its use.” That is, he recognized that writing and publishing is always a politically potent mixture, combining the individual and intentional authority of an author amid the flux of competing meanings and contexts that are consistently deployed and redeployed in highly charged acts of direct communication, as well as contemporary or historical interpretation.3
Here is one way to align Foucault’s fertile projects that developed during the 1970s. The combined plans for and eventually realized histories of sexuality, alongside the histories of various ways in which bodies and states were classified, disciplined, and punished, were all part of a related concern to construct overlapping genealogies of the Western self and its soul, and his own self and soul as a part of that general process or optic. As he had written in Surveiller et punir, the soul after all is both “an effect and an instrument of a political anatomy.” It is “the prison of the body,” and the object of his book was a “correlative history” of the “modern soul and a new power of judgement,” underpinned by a juridical-scientific apparatus that would manage it.4 This might help to pinpoint his own very particular engagement with the conceptual opposition, so central to postwar French thought, between the political (le politique) and the sphere of politics or government (la politique) where law intersects. There, he could focus on the construction of what he called the hermeneutics of the subject, which worked across both fields. This sort of interest, which Stuart Elden has recently discussed, requires us to recognize that although his canvas was vast and his corpus extensive, his work always and self-consciously remained partial.5 It was continuously supplemented rather than replaced or rejected, because Foucault was neither a lumper nor a splitter, but a compulsive tinkerer. He well knew the impossibility of going beyond contexts or frames of reference to the writing of anything like pure history, untainted by prejudice, self-interest, or present-mindedness on one side, or of providing complete account of epistemologically self-contained practices on the other. There never was any one pure moment of epistemological rupture [coupure] that could fully explain change, conceptual or otherwise, despite what Althusserian colleagues suggested.
Against this, he wanted to show that “the history of thought could not have the revelatory role of a transcendental moment” [l’histoire de la pensée ne pourrait avoir ce rôle révélateur du moment transcendental]. It was better seen, “in short, as a kind of historical phenomenology” of particular moments [en bref comme une sorte de phénoménologie historique].6 This was not a new thought, and his work on the limitations and classifications of scientific and economic knowledge, for example, shows profound debts to French teachers and predecessors such as Georges Canguilhem and Louis Rougier who, alongside Jean Hyppolite and Georges Dumézil, were inspirations.7 But these epistemological limits cohered in his work around an extraordinarily capacious sense of which particular traces remained both functional and fungible from the vast array of historically conditioned systems of thought and classification open to Foucault as an obsessive genealogist of the self. Parsing his quarry, it became clear that in order to pursue such historical phenomenology, there could only be particular “lines of attack” that might open up a “verbal performance” to historical analysis, and allow us to see its political remainders and take its measure.8 It’s hard not to hear the resonant frequency of Nietzsche and Marx behind these claims, valorizing both for recognizing the state of the debt that the past pays to the present, while simultaneously chastising both for their interpretations of historical change. The nature of his own debts to both figures combined anew during the period after 1968 most obviously, championing an original account of power that would put Marx and Marxism back in the nineteenth century where he thought they belonged. He recounted this in various contemporary interviews.9
He rejected the idea, that is to say, that these pioneers in his fields of study had been able to go beyond their boundaries. As he had already suggested by the mid-1960s, in the justly celebrated but headily baroque work Les mots et les choses (1966), Marxism was locked into a nineteenth-century paradigm that it could not transcend. The apparently radical options of Ricardian pessimism and Marxian revolutionism were, in his eyes, nothing more than two sides of the same coin: “At the deepest level of Western knowledge, Marx introduced no real discontinuity [coupure]: It found its place without difficulty.” Why? According to Foucault, both Marxism and modern theories of political economy were simply two ways of examining the “relations of anthropology and History as they are established by economics through the notions of scarcity and labour.”10 For his purposes, nineteenth-century Marxism was like a “fish in water.”11 How the nineteenth century determined the relationship between wealth and poverty, how strategies of governmentality learned to navigate the so-called social question, and how liberalism became something like the master discourse of this policy remained crucial to Foucault’s interests in delineating genealogically the “philosophical states” [états philosophiques] and stakes of this century, the one he thought most fundamentally behind our own modernity.12 But that concern had long been apparent since his first big book (simultaneously a doctoral thesis), Histoire de la folie (1961), and had already prefigured this intense focus on the problems of transitioning into the nineteenth century through the prisms of madness, sexuality, criminality, and the pathological draw of the nearby hospital at Salpêtrière whose archives would help cement his work, and where he would eventually die.13 If we were to apply these threads and connections to Foucault’s own attempt to write the history of modern neoliberalism in the latter half of the 1970s, might we both take the measure of his debt to his own past, as well as see his engagement as a local, polemical exercise in historical phenomenology?
To begin with, Foucault obviously built upon a deeper and more explicitly political rejection of Marxism. Nineteenth-century Marx and Marxism had not been able to transcend their own time and place by naysaying the sort of “communistologie” and state-phobia that went alongside contemporary French Marxism.14 Foucault chose instead to cultivate what had developed after 1968 in ways that were “profoundly anti-Marxist” [profondement antimarxiste] and challenge binary ideas of sovereignty.15 Radical socialists were, he thought, unable to recognize the extent of their indebtedness to an old paradigm that was no longer relevant, particularly given the expansive liberal practices of government that had, in his mind, become much more pervasive.16 So, while his counter-conceptual and genealogical focus routinely took him back to questions and intuitions posed by Marx, as Étienne Balibar has clearly shown, Foucault’s cycles of engagement stemmed not only from an interest in intramural critique, but were also filtered through generational cycles of breaking with, or breaking away from [Abrechnung] foundational claims about knowledge, revolution, and anthropology. As he did so, moreover, Foucault consistently pursued his rejection of Marx with recourse to Kant.17 Kant’s cultivation of a critical sensibility offered him a more appealing mask through which to curate his own alternative genealogy of modern liberalism, one similar to the sort of revisionist return to Kant of earlier radical critics like Eduard Bernstein.
Such revisionism, however, dramatizes something of the divisions within and between scholarship concerned variously with Foucault himself, with the consistency or otherwise of his ideas across time and space. These routinely come to the fore in attempts to explain the surface-level oddity of Foucault’s move toward an accounting with neoliberalism in the later 1970s. As he finished work on Discipline and Punish around February 1975, Foucault developed a critique of his own work on power, and he seemed to begin to think about the relevance of political thought and its history for contemporary politics in new ways. This combines the idea that he was both working toward a new theory of power and engaging with drastic local criticism in the form of his defense of the nouveaux philosophes on the one hand, and defending himself against both the social historians and the postmodern critics like Jean Baudrillard on the other. It also coheres well with his developing ambition to write a multivolume history of sexuality, at the same time that during the middle of the decade he was running through a period of increasingly pessimistic moods in the autumn of 1976.18 And as James Miller famously suggests, Foucault at this point seemed to be living “in texts.”19
This sense of withdrawal, however, is problematic, for it runs alongside myriad political interventions that have caused other biographers like Macey to configure Foucault once again as the “Professor Militant.”20 His long-standing involvement with the Groupe d’information sur les prisons, protesting against the war in Vietnam, working for Goutte d’Or in support of migrants and migration, his involvement with the Alain Jaubert affair (where he was beaten for offering to help someone ejected from a demonstration by the police), his work on the Comité de Défense de la Presse et des Journalistes where he represented Le Figaro as well as being involved with Libération, his continued connection to the Gauche Proletarienne and concerns with the question of popular violence, as well as his activities alongside the Ligue des droits de l’homme and the Trotskyist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire. All of this implies something rather livelier than someone merely living in texts.21 Yet both claims clearly hold some truth. Struggling to find a new intellectual direction at the same time as he was variously committed politically across the 1970s itself suggests an important continuity running through Foucault’s last major decade.
Another line of argument comes from more recent reckonings with Foucault and the problem of neoliberalism. In his important and densely packed interpretation, Serge Audier has pointed out the radical differences between Foucault’s militancy in the early 1970s and his politics later in the decade, tracking this move through a more general analysis of French liberalism.22 The revisioning of liberalism under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Raymond Barre progressed through the 1970s, particularly following the extremely close 1974 result where Giscard defeated François Mitterand, and by the time of the 1978 election Foucault, like Raymond Aron, was being asked by Politique Hebdo for comment.23 He turned to the ideas of ordoliberalism as a first response, trying to see whether or not the move to reconcile modern French liberalism with the demands of the international economy was simultaneously a rejection of socialism and planning, as well as a workable political-economic strategy. Yet as Foucault discerned it, Giscard’s economic policy was based on the idea that the modern liberal state was a rule-of-law state, or Rechtsstaat, wherein planning and welfare reforms were part and parcel of its mainstream agenda. It was not a “total” state of the kind that ordoliberals rejected, for in Foucault’s contemporaneous reconstruction of that tradition, ordoliberals always think the political costs of economic plans are too much to bear and should therefore always be rejected.24 Furthermore, those who attacked Giscard on principle were, from the point of view of contemporary Marxism or socialism, doing just what Foucault wanted to avoid, that is, hardly caring about what sort of grasp on reality one might have and exercising a form of knee-jerk state phobia. His own “dénunciation” of the state was filtered through an attack on Giscard’s liberalism, while rejecting the criticisms of contemporary socialism.25 Audier’s argument is therefore that Foucault traveled far from his early 1970s Maoism during that decade, which explains his rather more sympathetic engagements with the political and economic reforms proposed by Giscard, Barre, and Rocard.26
Contrastingly, Peter Ghosh’s view is that in the context of the 1970s, this makes Foucault’s politics quite straightforward and rather predetermined, less contextually mutable than Audier’s claim. With his adherence to a “litany of conventional radical causes” stemming from a Gallic adherence to intellectual universalism, in Ghosh’s rendition Foucault’s focus on power has almost made the nation-state into an irrelevance.27 Here, three points locate Foucault in a distinctively French context. First, society or the social is primary, though Foucault’s groups or epistemes remain close to Comte’s hierarchies. Where the former does replace the latter, it gives rise to what Ghosh thinks of as a loose form of structuralism with an implicit teleology. Second, a connection between science and knowledge and his own sense of self as an intellectual, one that relates strongly to a concern with the fate of transparency in modern systems of knowledge and discourse.28 Third, his continuous interest in the nature of surrealism and the question of individual autonomy. Together, this combination of structure, institution, and surrealism frames the otherwise contradictory poles of his work, with a move to Kant in order to discern limits to discourse and knowledge, but a surrealist utopianism in his defense of an “absolute power to change one’s life.”29
To substantiate that, between 1968, his election to the Collège de France in 1969, and the Iranian Revolution in 1978, Foucault’s politics for Ghosh are absolutely typical in their rejection of all that is seemingly “intolerable.”30 The Klaus Croissant affair in 1977, when the Red Army Faction lawyer sought but was denied asylum with reference to constitutional law dating back to 1946, led to Foucault’s engagement with the German question and contemporary terrorism that helped push him toward a consideration of economic liberalism and its German genealogies. More specifically, this meant tracing the roots of the German Wirtschaftswunder of the postwar years, as it developed as a new social model under Helmut Schmidt. Giscard was close to Schmidt, and Foucault was interested in the ways in which Christian democracy was formed in a series of historical-phenomenological moments that could be traced back to ordoliberalism.31 Allied with the anti-1789 as well as anti-Gulag politics of the 1970s and the partial renovations of the French left through journals like Faire, Foucault’s German comparison took him back to Wilhelm Röpke, among others. Viewing the contemporary problems of European socialism through ordoliberal lenses allowed him to suggest that there is no “autonomous socialist governmentality.”32 Socialism remains too statist, beholden to ideological dogma, and therefore too utopian to be effective as a contemporary strategy. Socialism in effect has become a model of the total state for Foucault, unlike Nazism, in fact, and this makes its analysis of power problematic, because “power is not a substance.”33 Alongside revisionist accounts of modern socialism that had been repurposed since the 1959 Bad Godesberg decisions of the SPD, Foucault thought that such revisionism was no sort of betrayal, but a necessary update providing an entry point into the liberal game of modern politics. Willy Brandt, too, offered a new kind of German realism about modern politics and modern liberalism, and the French left needed to learn from it.
Foucault also entered the fray over German challenges to French politics in Le Nouvel Obs by defending Croissant at the level of a right to defense in court (liberal rights).34 He wouldn’t affiliate with the RAF position but he would defend the right to asylum.35 On November 15, there was an illegal demonstration, moving from République to Nation, where Foucault took part and was beaten up. This led him to a flippant-sounding but appropriately angry diagnosis of police brutality as part of a “pleasure bonus” for doing that job.36 Foucault and Daniel Defert then went to East Berlin, where they were stopped by guards and searched, but from their hotel in West Berlin they could hardly fail to note the irony that they were attacked in Germany for apparently supporting the RAF, while in France they were attacked by colleagues and friends precisely for not doing so.37
Theoretical connections remained just as complicated. This is most obvious in the practical politics of prison reform that lay behind his early Collège de France lectures in 1972 on the nature of civil war and the punitive society, but which itself also continued his prior critique of law as constitutive of juridical genealogies of statecraft. Both claims resurfaced in a more general analysis of civil war as the defining problem of modern politics a few years later in 1976, when the question posed was how “society” became the thing that practices of governmentality were designed to defend, and how the juridical model of sovereignty had to be overcome.38 Foucault’s critique of the contemporary liberal state noticeably changed as he engaged more directly with the history of modern political theory, in ways that seem rather less “fragmentary” to my mind than some of his interpreters suggest.39
In this respect, three of Foucault’s major lecture series of the last half of the 1970s offer three rival versions of the sort of reason of state associated with the modern welfare state. In Society Must Be Defended, a juridical genealogy of sovereignty and war, as well as of civil war, is outlined, with their counter-discursive contrasts drawn from what Foucault calls historico-critical arguments (such as the “ancient constitutionalism” mobilized by the Levellers and Diggers against juridical models of kingly sovereignty during the English Revolution). This naturalizing of history against legalism counters the predominance of the juridical narrative of sovereignty in modern politics that runs from Hobbes to Rousseau in his rendition, offering two sides of the same argument. Here, raison d’état is seen as effectively “conservative,” but simultaneously, when updated, reason of state becomes the basic precondition for the idea of perpetual peace.40 Juridical political theory on this analysis offered a “monarchical” response to epic-histories focused on conflict and struggle, and these competing genealogies ran up to the nineteenth century as histories of either the Norman Conquest and Anglo-Saxonism in England, or aristocratic anti-nobilism in France through figures such as Boulainvilliers.41 At the level of political theory, this meant that seeking the emergence of “society” could not be found in Machiavelli’s Prince or Hobbes’ Leviathan, for the one is not the origin of reason of state theory, and the other is not a story of war.42 Society emerged in the nineteenth century, bearing the traces of those racial conjectures and conflict-driven histories that were domesticated by liberalism as a sort of counter-project of governmentality, in contrast with neo-Roman models of sovereignty.43 In his own genealogies, Foucault’s account of historical-critical discourses suggests an alternative pre-history to Hobbesian notions of politics in ancient constitutionalism. These were updated in and through the French Revolution, where the analysis of social war out of ancient constitutionalism and anti-nobilism came to shape modern socialism after the revolution, while in England, it would buttress the rejection of oligarchy and political despotism made by radical constitutionalists and Whigs such as Bolingbroke.44 Tracing the various languages of these forms of legitimation was crucial to Foucault’s account of how society itself became a subject of legitimation and control. Trying to think beyond sovereignty or contract models of politics also suggested other forms of discourse, particularly those pertaining to pastoralism and cameralism in Europe.
In Security, Territory, Population, he continued the theme by exploring various strands of liberalism concerned with limited or regulated government, particularly the cameralist model of the well-ordered police state, for example. This allowed him to highlight the contrast between pastoral models of politics and juridical models of sovereignty. In turn, this became woven into a broader history of liberal governmentality, understood as a series of concrete practices and policies of government, and which were distinct from, or perhaps better yet, counterposed to, traditional conceptions of sovereignty. Such liberal forms of governmentality, that is to say, had their own counter-histories to juridical political theory. These could be found in traditions of pastoralism and care, or welfare, whose roots extended deep into pre-Christian ideas of shepherding and care for a flock, which transitioned into Christianity and the cultivation of a certain sort of ascetic, well-regulated self-conduct, and which in turn lay behind the birth of a modern Polizeistaat, or modern welfare-state. Once again, though, the crucial figure whose work hinges together these double narratives in Foucault’s history of political theory as a kind of discursive war between concepts of juridical sovereignty and modern liberal governmentality, remains Kant. It was Kant who proffered an answer to the question that when thinking about the connections between theory and practice as well as perpetual peace, the state must provide a juridical framework of regulation first, followed secondarily by the pursuit of public happiness and the care for population. Moreover, this required in Kant’s work a strong sovereign whose “private” reason was the prerequisite of the development of a wider, cosmopolitan, and “public” reason. Justice first followed by happiness second was the synthetic offering, which prohibited revolution at the level of abstract right, but which simultaneously defended forms of revolutionary enthusiasm if properly motivated (often by appeal to radical Protestantism). Kant’s synthesis remained an appealing model for Foucault, as the caring, pastoral side of state was routinely sidelined by purely juridical readings of the modern liberal state as Rechtsstaat. As Foucault also claimed, however, if one can only put the theory of politics into practice through the cultivation of experience and self-creation (or a sort of Kantian focus on autonomy), and understand that this is a necessarily historical claim, then it is perhaps less surprising than it might be to find Foucault suggesting that both pre-Christian Greek ideas of control as well as early Christian ideals of regulated conduct and asceticism, also provide crucial filters in the elaboration of liberal governmentality. Here, the “hermeneutics of the subject” are aligned with a particular dispositif based around a claim about how power/knowledge is constructed as a form of “truth” about liberalism, and whose practical predicate concerns the art of not being governed too much.45
This very broad and exceedingly complex arc of conceptual history behind the pastoral model of politics, from the archaic Greeks to early Christianity, or what will later be re-described as a move from barbarism and religion, toward the medieval period and culminating in the modern idea of the state, was ostensibly recognized first by Catholic anti-Machiavellians as the original “reason of state” theorists. Alongside their obvious religious justifications, they also set forth a crucial modern idea that the economy should become a central ground upon which state-interest and state-care might be targeted. Here, conjoined ideas about human sociability, the necessity of prudential conduct by the statesman and regulated conduct by the individual, as well as the concept of an economy run principally according to the dictates of non-intervention, or laissez-faire, began to emerge with the transition from mercantilist to physiocratic analyses. In France, these focused heavily on the grain trade, while in our subsequent histories of modern political and economic thought, this secularizing narrative of an “invisible hand,” which, through the mechanism of market exchange based on individual self-interest leads socially to collective prosperity, found its most fulsome elaboration in the work of Adam Smith and the emergence of a new science of political economy. It signaled what Albert Hirschmann would famously christen as the transition from the passions to the interests as the basis for this modern development, and Foucault had long been committed to the view that its emergence as a language of governmentality was crucial.46
Leaving the market “free” as the mechanism through which a strong, but limited, state for the purpose of national defense and public good provision (including welfare) constituted the beginning of a liberal political economy-based solution to Kant’s problem. That is, how to reconcile welfare and happiness through a progress toward Enlightenment, orienting statecraft and subjectivity through commercial sociability, enlightened absolutism, and competitive emulation. Market distortions are still a danger in this construction, for if markets fail to function adequately on the one side, or if the state penetrates society and overcompensates for market failure on the other, the results can be monstrous, whether in terms of structural crises or militaristic forms of competition. Later, of course, Marxists would develop this line of inquiry, hoping that such moments of crisis or rupture might prove decisive, but Foucault rejected the catastrophism behind their challenge. Finally, then, in The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault offers a counter-genealogy of liberal failures to stabilize the compound of a free economy with a strong state in the twentieth century, particularly in response to ideological challenges to liberalism through war, fascism, and Nazism, by seeking the roots of a different sort of reason of state, one that has been reconfigured in principle as a sort of Wohlfahrtstaatsräson, but in which the practices of liberal statecraft have been found wanting. Seeing something similar, Sheldon Wolin opposed Staatsräson to Wohlfahrstaatsräson, and thought of it as a style of neoliberal rhetoric that actually served the end of a corporate American state, even as it professed to reject its premises.47 Foucault focused instead on the priority of utility as a new “technology of government,” one that might instead seek to promote a form of liberty after liberalism.48
Neoliberal reformulations and revisions in response to early twentieth-century liberal failings were outlined in Foucault’s account of two particular strands of German Ordoliberalismus and Chicago School microeconomic theories of political economy.49 Because of his interest in curating an anti-Marxist genealogy of the modern neoliberal state, after delineating both raison d’état and pastoralism as the two sides of the modern welfare state, and having consigned Marxism to its nineteenth-century history, Foucault now began to attack colleagues and contemporaries who sought either to update Marxist social theory in order to find in the modern liberal state something obviously to fear, or to defend as the lasting legacy of the French Revolution in contemporary France as a counterweight to the legacy of Stalinist bureaucratic politics. Contemporary Marxists often saw the modern welfare state as necessarily repressive, instinctively fascistic, structurally subservient to the interests of a ruling elite, and something straightforwardly to be overthrown or destroyed. These knee-jerk sorts of phobie d’état took shape in the attacks by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on West Germany as “fascist” in the wake of the Croissant affair, in André Glucksmann’s account of democracy as a “new form” of fascism, and in Nicos Poulantzas’s attempt to navigate a path through the “relative autonomy” of the modern state whose ruling class ideology could easily slip over into forms of repressive intolerance and fascism.50 But such views were, Foucault suggested, straightforwardly ridiculous ways to think about contemporary politics at the level of principle. Not only because political life was so obviously reliant upon the complex interaction between states and markets in a globalized world, but instantaneous phobie d’état promised little more than a new form of subjection. Parsing these claims is difficult. Poulantzas’s contemporaneous attack on the “crisis of parties” was germane, for instance, to understanding new forms of state authoritarianism, about which he remained concerned to call out, but Foucault thought that Marxist approaches to politics were structurally problematic, offering generic and even genetic theories in place of the study of actual practices and policies.51 So, while he remained ambivalent about politics that came through institutions, parties, and states in general, he rejected in principle the thought that one could somehow theorize in advance what was always going to be the problem or issue at hand. Such at least was the claim he repeated in an interview with Bernard Henri-Lévy in March 1977.52
In particular, Foucault’s recourse to Kant for thinking about the relationship between the legal state and the nature of individual autonomy beyond it remained critical to the continuous evolution of his analysis.53 Each time, by seeking a genealogy of the various prisms or refractions of the state, the nature of modern nation-state power, and the critique of the state offered by neoliberalism, he revisioned the ways in which the history of political and economic thought could inform contemporary politics. Indeed, because the purpose of genealogy is to unmask power relations hidden by juridical or state-centered models, constructing in their place forms of “antisciences,” this approach was something that could use what he called the “insurrection of knowledges” for the purposes of critique.54 As applied to politics, he argued that “in no way have I wanted to undertake the genealogy of the state itself or the history of the state. I have simply wanted to show some sides or edges of what we could call the reflective prism.”55 Earlier, he had related this to his interest in the ways that geography constructs the contours of these prismatic visions of the state, explaining that territoriality was clearly foundational to “juridico-politique” conceptions of sovereignty that could be countered by both pastoralism and neoliberalism.56 During this period, in and around 1978, he was also renewing his engagement with the history of science (evidenced in his introduction to the work of Georges Canguilhem), and thinking about the epistemological limits to generalized forms of critique and investigation. Politically, this led him to reconsider the possibility of non-Western models of revolution and political journalism, developed during visits to Japan, and his engagement with the Iranian Revolution.
As is well known, the Italian newspaper Corriere della sera commissioned a series entitled “Michel Foucault Investigates” alongside the wider team of Alain Finkielkraut, Thierry Voeltzel, and André Glucksmann. The thought here was that although “ideas do not rule the world,” there are so many ideas and “the world is not passively ruled by its rulers,” that “intellectuals will work together with journalists at the point where ideas and events meet.”57 Alberto Cavallari, head of the paper’s Paris desk, approached Foucault and he agreed to work on the Iranian Revolution.58 In terms of his support for Iran, Foucault was attacked both at home and abroad.59 But what he proposed was a form of “anti-strategic morality,” a claim designed to defend the singularity of the revolutionary sort of spiritualism and political imaginary being pursued in a novel form, at least in comparison with Western models of politics, in contemporary Iran. Against the “infamy” of modern sovereignty doctrine, a new claim about ceremonial and theatrical forms of power, and revolutionary ruptures without juridical foundations, could find practical contemporary form in Iran or Japan. Just as he had sought in his own academic productions ways of seeing the challenge to sovereignty through literature and art via critique and genealogy, now outside the confines of Western political theory and practice, he saw another world of political possibilities. His interest in the counter-genealogies of pastoralism and his defense of popular violence came together to appropriate the novelty of non-Western modern revolution for his own thinking about politics going forward, while allowing him to reject both the socialist critique of the state in Europe as well as the “monopoly” by Western political theory on the concept of revolution, looking backward. With no preconceived patterns of intention to political action like this, the role of the observer could only be that of the intellectual engagé, an appropriately journalistic and Aronian-inspired motif.60 The one figure who still continued to make sense of all these connections was Kant, whose centrality to modern liberalism, governmentality, and territory could also be reconfigured as what Foucault thought of as a form of “journalisme philosophique.” Kant provided a method of posing questions genealogically and critically, a way of getting at content through form.61
As ever, Foucault was not interested in the idea that history was capable of offering anything like objective truth, but he constantly sought out ways in which orders that were described and instituted by historical developments and which were often, as it were, forms of a “forgotten past,” nevertheless remained “profoundly inscribed” in the present.62 He was sensitive, that is to say, to what sort of stylistic models, registers or Kantian forms of “taste” might best uncover these legacies. And it seems to me that one way in which Foucault’s lectures on the history of political theory in general, and his reckoning with neoliberalism particularly, find their form is as a species of philosophical journalism, wherein his public rejection of contemporary forms of phobie d’état aligned with a wider discontent with the sorts of projects associated with Marxist interpretations of both the French and Russian Revolutions in the 1970s, indeed the category of revolution in conventional political theory at all. Here, his practical assessments seemed closest to the wider claims of Raymond Aron and François Furet especially, even if the route through which he got there seemed rather different.63 He agreed with the thought that “the return of the revolution, that’s our problem.”64
But recent historiography has also tried to claim that Foucault might well have positively advocated a certain sort of neoliberal politics himself. How? Michael Behrent, alongside Daniel Zamora, connects Foucault’s interest in neoliberalism to his long-standing anti-humanism as well as his engagements in 1970s political debates, wondering whether he admired its unit like assessment of individuals as utilitarian calculating machines, with interests separate from the state and whose subjectivity remained somewhat spectral to the authorship and authorization of their desires, but who were nonetheless “governmentalizable.”65 Under that construction, the subject, rather like the Foucauldian author, is not exactly dead but certainly not entirely self-aware. At the same time, his attack on both statism and anti-statism across the left pushed him to engage with neoliberalism as a more appropriate framework for cultivating tolerance to certain sorts of minority pursuits and practices.66 Behrent’s is a philosophical answer. Like the neoliberals and the ordoliberals, Foucault is presented as going “beyond man” as a subject of inquiry, marrying anti-humanism with an interest in the micro-dimensions of power. On this view, Foucault went back to the 1960s to reiterate his anti-humanism, and then redeployed it in a new world and for a new time.67 This meant looking at the way liberalism began to focus on population as a new political problem, because “man was to population what the subject of right was to the sovereign.”68 When Chicago economic neoliberalism spoke of the human “machine,” therefore, there was an affinity, an anti-humanism, that reinvigorated the model of economic man, the “homo economicus” of the marginalists.69 It did so, however, in order to defend the individual from the grip of the state. This was also another way of going back to Kant, just as the ordoliberals and the revisionist socialists had earlier done, for an austere sense of the limits of human autonomy within the juridical structures of the liberal state, but it also gave a sense of the way in which legal regulation and public happiness were discrete topics.
A secularized narrative of the “invisible” hand of historical progress and Enlightenment offered a structural connection between Kant’s philosophical strictures and the practical problem of how to think about the possibilities of perpetual peace.70 In Foucault’s rereading, the prerequisite for Kantian peace is the necessity of planetary globalization, and this was entirely what he suggested lay behind the renovations liberalism and neoliberalism sought during the twentieth century. As he tried to navigate around economism, and the anthropological problem of how to consider “man” as a subject of analysis, as well as how to navigate around the juridical model of politics drawn from the trajectory running through Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau, he sought to return to the Kantian question of how to have a strong state without war, but in the absence of contract theory and under a form of neoliberal governmentality that valorized the opening up of commercial markets.71 As he wrote, “the guarantee of perpetual peace is therefore actually commercial globalization,”72 through a form of modern liberalism that had an “economy of power” combining “freedom and security.”73 Yet while Kant’s politics fixed as a regulative ideal a republican constitutionalism that could run alongside global commercial sociability, his skeptical epistemology showed the impossibility of total knowledge about how this might actually work, suggesting that there could be no purely “economic” sovereign at all.74 Audier, too, finds in Kant the pivotal figure in Foucault’s engagement with neoliberalism in the wider political context of the 1970s, when he wrote essays on the nature of critique, on Kant specifically, and on the “analytical philosophy of politics.”75
In 1978, Foucault continued this by furthering the withering attack upon Ernst Cassirer’s interpretation of Kant that he had first written about in 1966. Then, he suggested that Cassirer’s history of ideas was too old-fashioned. Now, it tied into his updated genealogies of pastoralism and counter-conduct, and to the 1978 lecture, “Qu’est-ce que la critique? Critique et Aufklärung.” Here, we can see his sense of how these connections were being redrawn, with Kantian Enlightenment and Foucauldian “critique” aligning to consider forms of governmentality in an “historicophilosophical” perspective that has much in common with Max Weber’s analysis of Western “rationalization” as bound up with claims about the various arts of not being governed.76 Ordoliberalism in Germany is presented as an economic discourse that emerged from an anti-statism formed in a rejection of the war economies of both the First World War, and then under National Socialism, as well as planned forms of rationalization, forms of what Foucault would term “étatisation” or “statification.” These were nevertheless discourses, from within which cameralist ideas of the well-managed and well-governed welfare-state were redeployed. One idea here is that from an original moment of state-phobia, a new sense of political economy as a form of ordered and embedded liberalism emerged, focused around questions of calculation, probability, and uncertainty and the important but limited place of the state in engaging with mechanisms of exchange. This was, perhaps, a misreading of just how proximate many ordoliberal ideas were to the elaboration of National Socialist doctrines.77 But by contrast, the criticisms of statification as economic and political mismanagement that Foucault targeted were, in effect, the guiding themes motivating the early work of Friedrich Hayek, whose place in the pantheon of modern neoliberalism is assured. Hayek himself had learned much from French critics (such as Henry Michel) of Kant’s critique of the Enlightenment police state. In Germany, too, Walter Eucken updated Kantian criticism in his own reformulations of ordoliberalism. Foucault noted both versions of this renewed movement “back to Kant” in his own lectures.78 And he claimed that these discourses were not a priori forms of phobie d’état, but they had developed out of certain interpretations of statification that were responses to the rise of totalitarianism and National Socialism on one side of the ledger, and the New Deal and the modern American state during the Cold War on another.79
Louis Rougier, a pioneering figure in French neoliberalism and another interpreter of Kant was, according to Foucault, a “rare good epistemologist.”80 He was someone clearly important in moving Foucault toward what he came to see as the “analytical philosophy of politics,” played as a sort of “game” with language and meaning, and that presupposed that the philosopher’s role is independent critique, arbitration, and explication.81 By so doing, the critical philosopher could focus epistemologically on limit cases, or ways of seeing contemporary challenges and ruptures to Western political concepts and languages (whether from Cambodia and Chile, or Iran and Indonesia) in longer-term perspective.82 As a model for thinking about the economic-juridical order, Rougier’s analysis was limited to the Rechtsstaat.83 With neoliberalism and the separation of sovereignty from government, or administration, Foucault saw the need to develop a new critique of what he thought of as “political reason.” This he did in his Tanner Lectures.
Comparing the state as the centralized agency, and pastoralism as the individualized agency of governmental reason, Foucault compressed his attempt to refract juridical sovereignty theory back through a pastoralist counter history, focusing on the idea of the shepherd and their flock, the Hebrew and Eastern roots of this tradition, how it came into conflict with Greek political thought, and then how it became central both to Christian statecraft in general, and its forms of individual self-regulation in particular.84 In fact, the Tanner Lectures effectively synthesized his Collège de France arguments, as we can now see, in several interesting ways. In the contemporary welfare state, there is a combination, the result of a long and tangled history, of state authority as the management of political-juridical power over citizens, as well as pastoral care for subjects.85 These were the two models of raison d’état and of Polizei, each with their positive and negative tasks to undertake, that formed the boundaries of morality and politics under the modern state.86 In The Birth of Biopolitics, however, this transitions into a study of modern neoliberalism understood as an art of the economy, separate from the apparatuses of the state. Here, the internal social control of citizens is not undertaken by the juridically sovereign government, but through economic governmentality.87 These form a series of tripartite relations between a critique of monopolistic tendencies within capitalism as outlined by Schumpeter, forms of what Foucault calls conformable economic action (which seems to amount to action that adheres to the rudiments of a general economic approach such as that outlined by Gary Becker), and a critique of contemporary social policy. Indeed, Becker’s contemporaneous appreciation of the rising importance of economic theory in general was something that Foucault seems to have picked up on.88 But together, this made up the prism through which his genealogy of market-based commercial society and commercial sociability was filtered, and how it was seen in and through various and overlapping discursive structures across several generations.89
Another part of the cultivation of a new direction for French politics in the 1970s that Foucault was interested in came through the figure of Robert Marjolin, crucial arbiter of French engagement with the European Community, and someone whose intellectual formation had been rooted in the work of Elie Halévy. Halévy in turn, through Marjolin but also through the powerfully public presence of Aron and Furet, was reanimated as a figure with something to say about the complex stability at the heart of any modern industrial democracy, just as he had been in the earlier part of the twentieth century.90 Halévy had been crucial to those in the 1930s in France who were thinking about the problems of how to revive and renew liberalism and recast what Charles Maier referred to as the “stability” of bourgeois Europe. Other figures alongside Rougier, like Besançon, discoursed in Paris in 1938 at the famous Colloque Walter Lippman, and followed up a year later with the development of a new center concerned with the renovation of liberalism.91 This was the disciplinary and institutional origin story of modern neoliberalism as a sort of “thought collective.”92
Foucault’s sense of these pasts was filtered through his own Kantian lenses, as well as through his reading of other modern French political economists who had written on the rise of neoliberalism and historical ordoliberalism, figures like François Bilger, for example, whose lectures on liberal thought in contemporary Germany he read carefully.93 The nineteenth-century “revolution” was about economic power, and hence about poverty and society. In turn, pastoral power offered a counter-genealogy that could be more broadly international than traditional and nationally focused European political theory.94 But if historical reason of state had cultivated the sense that the government ruled over and limited the extent of the market, a new liberal doctrine was emerging in which market failures were to be explained both as administrative or managerial mistakes, foolhardy attempts to intervene in the economy. Alongside this, ordoliberalism and latterly modern American economic neoliberalism supplemented these criticisms of state planning with a new criterion of judgment, that the market should in fact become the metric for holding the state to account. This made neoliberal governmentality a new sort of reason of state, where the state is “under the supervision of a market.”95 Because of this, contemporary strategies of political economy and social policy had to change, and here, Foucault thought, French social policy was stuck in the past. Since 1929, he wrote, the French social model had been premised on full employment and financial devaluation, and had sought to bring about its ends effectively on the same model as the war economy, cultivating forms of “national solidarity” and administrative or dirigiste political economy that were no longer credible.96 Such connections opened up the possibility of discerning a new neoliberal reason of state, one that might unite both European state traditions grounded in a liberal sense of the necessary limits to the state, and an American state tradition rooted in the idea of liberal strategies of legitimation through values and structures. Put together, they provided the genealogy of an economic style that was genuinely transatlantic, but which had some shared origins in the notion of a social crisis, a Gesellschaftskrisis reflected in the development of new styles of economic thinking.97
This kind of work was an appropriate path through which to contextualize Atlanticist versions of neoliberalism that were also beginning to be discussed in France through the work of Henri Lepage. His own study, Demain le capitalisme (1978), had begun to incorporate the work of Gary Becker on human capital into contemporary discourse, but primarily in ways designed to showcase the radical scientific ambition, as opposed to the merely ideological cast, of the neoliberal program at the same time as it would also show the “hegemony” of American over European neoliberalism.98 The critique of the state through the freedom of the market cut more than two ways, though. On the right, this was easily pressed into service as an attack upon the dirigiste policies of French socialists and the so-called common program of the left. Equally, on the so-called “second left,” such criticisms bolstered the attempt to free society from the clutches of an overbearing state, allowing for the possibility of new forms of communal self-government or management, a pluralistically updated sense of populist autogestion inspired through the work of figures like Pierre Rosanvallon and journals like Faire or Autrement.99 Others, such as Foucault’s student Blandine Kriegel, would counteract this anti-statism of both left and right, by appealing to the need for a new, liberal sort of Francophone État de droit, or Rechtsstaat, all over again, in order to avoid the classical sort of Tocquevillian worry about a slide into the tyranny of the majority and social conformism.100
The need to develop a new standard of judgment, or a new metric, maps well onto Foucault’s developing sense of the power/knowledge couplet as analogous to a form of discursive “play,” within which a language of games, reciprocity, and attention to the mimetic quality of exchange and value to economic calculation would be important.101 This was particularly the case when thinking about powers that are designed to be situated and specifically analyzed across micro-levels, and has remained crucial to much French economic sociology on the nature of convention, interpretation, and value in political economy.102 At the time, however, Foucault’s fascination with the micro-level and with various subcultures outside of the reach of the state coalesced with this interest in neoliberal strategies of segregating state and economy. Contrariwise to Rosanvallon and the autogestion movement, Foucault argued that modern neoliberalism offered a resolute challenge to conventional histories of political theory; it chimed, that is to say, with a more profound, cultural shift toward individual judgment and innovation as well as disruption: “We no longer ask a political theory to say what to do,” he claimed.103 Equally, in other interviews such as those with Jean Bitoux in Gai Pied, about San Francisco and homosexual subcultures, the crucial question of personal conduct away from the prying eyes of the state seem again to connect the personal and the political.104 Here was both a renewed exploration of toleration toward practices routinely considered as forms of deviance, which could be defended given this sort of neoliberal critique of the state, as well as something else that became apparent to those viewing a bloated state amid the multiple crises of the “disciplinary society” in July 1978, of the “extraordinary costs” of wielding repressive power.105
If the obvious site through which the various crises of French politics and economics in the 1970s were experienced was the state, it too was obviously the principal site of left critique. Foucault, in rejecting the idea of a straightforward critique of the state based on a particular form of state theory, therefore also engaged in a particular form of self-criticism, moving away from his concern with discipline and toward biopolitics, that is, his broad transition from a concern with the sovereign state (as a death-taking enterprise) to liberal governmentality (as a life-making association), which needs power over populations, but whose powers are limited. Updated as the “deal-making” strategies behind modern neoliberalism, utilitarianism as a sort of shorthand moral psychology returns anew here, to do away with the new juridical fictions of modern political languages and discourse in ways that Foucault was so keen to follow, finding in the absence of bio-power the presence of freedom.106 What this also reiterates, of course, is that Foucault’s work continued his search for those contexts that might matter in the otherwise labile world of ideas (monde des idées), and which could help to cultivate or curate a new “sense” or “taste” in the public sphere as a form of “positivity” (positivité).107 Older, more traditional analysis of “disruptions” in the history of thought showed there were no singular moments of “coupure” that could provide obvious clarity out of crisis or uncertainty, either in the past or the present. Therefore, the role of the history of ideas in helping us to think about contemporary politics and economics is one of constructing lines of attack, or particular sorts of visions that might challenge contemporary nostrums.108 It can do nothing more, or less.
As he had suggested, the history of ideas cannot have the “revelatory role of a transcendental moment” (rôle révélateur du moment transcendental), which mechanical forms of rationality had sought since Kant. By contrast, his own genealogical approach offered a sort of “historical phenomenology” that is not a science, but which focuses on “words or signs of attack that provide for the analysis of verbal performance or argument” (signes d’attaque pour l’analyse des performances verbales).109 In this rendering, with reference to Lacan, the construction of belief is always a problem of psychology.110 He would not make this into a defense of the possibility or indeed the desirability of forms of radical democracy, but other colleagues routinely did. It did, however, buttress his own antipathy to what other colleagues saw as potentially Stalinist undercurrents to large-scale modern bureaucratic politics, what François Châtelet termed a form of “egocratie.”111
A new form of Enlightenment was needed to pursue this sort of strategy, which is why Foucault’s return to Kant is so crucial in the 1970s in providing a way of signaling both the background to debates about the free economy and republican constitutionalism, as well as hinting at ways beyond them.112 Contemporary neoliberalism in France was the “not laisser-faire” economy, and instead, the economy became a structuring guide to governmentality.113 This then offered a route through the division among the socialist party position in France around 1976, which veered between what Michel Rocard famously described as an “étatist and Jacobin” or a “decentralized and libertarian” left, the latter being the side of an argument that the so-called new economists appealed to.114 Equally, of course, by going back to Kant in the French context, this language of neoliberalism could also more routinely be aligned with the idea of a renovation or renewal of one or other of the multiple strands of liberalism that had emerged out of the postwar period. Contextualized, this could be located variously with reference to the Algerian crisis, the épuration of the intellectuals after Vichy, or in the renewal of interest in early socialism and producerism as manifested in the organization of the Fondation Saint Simon in the later 1970s.115 It could also, with reference to contemporary Anglo-American discourse, stand a related reconstruction of liberalism and justice filtered through the Kantian dimensions of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971). As figures like Rosanvallon would suggest in La crise de l’état providence, seen in this way Rawls was part of the mainstream in terms of his development of what the French straightforwardly referred to as “neoliberal” theories of justice.116 The sterner side of modern Kantianism from within these Francophone perspectives that emerged, however, could also be seen through his awareness of debates about the codification into the West German Criminal Code of an “Order against Radicals” in 1972, Para 129a, which Foucault was very well aware of.117
Whether Foucault was too optimistic about the freedom-enhancing possibilities of neoliberalism remains an important question. One of those who developed his critique was Francois Ewald, whose update of Foucault’s critique of political reason for the contemporary world offers a sense of what might be at stake in thinking about “Omnes et Singulatim, after Risk.” Ewald poses the problem of solidarity in a “big data” world of networks, hierarchies, and participants, combining privatization and open access, new digital platforms, and access to services with targeted forms of advertising, domination, and control.118 This sort of open freedom seems to offer new mechanisms of entrapment that are even harder to resist than the old-fashioned bureaucratic interventions of the juridical and bureaucratic state.119 The nineteenth-century transmission of liberalism offered a hope that one might “live dangerously,” alongside a politics structured by a fear of degeneration and interference.120 This is why, in part, the early ordoliberals and neoliberals looked back to these early liberal debates from the perspective of the 1930s and 1940s, as a way of shoring up a defense against the perils of both French and German socialism that sought to transcend such liberal freedoms.121 For if the history of socialism in the nineteenth century was really one of “totalization,” then “governmentality” under liberalism became the new ground upon which economic logics and political rationalities might align under a modern welfare state.122 It was also where minimal government might maximize collective benefit.123
Neoliberalism further pursued the primacy of this economic logic into a critique of liberal governmentality itself, and suggested ways in which modern political economy could go beyond the state that differed from contemporary Marxist diagnoses of the structural or legitimation crises of the state by focusing upon the inflation of the “compensatory mechanisms of freedom.”124 It was, that is to say, a problem of “statification” (étatisation).125 As a new problem, it was nonetheless couched in old language, namely Bentham’s question of what makes it onto the political agenda (which is to say, what the state should do), and what constitutes a non-agenda item, which could be a form of non-decision but which routinely meant that which the state must not do.126 What Foucault either refused, or consciously ignored, when writing of the moment was the idea that there was a “legitimation crisis,” suggesting that the crisis of liberalism was neither automatically or necessarily a crisis of capitalism.127 These struggles had historical roots, but were “signs of the crises of governmentality,” not of state theory. Moreover, the sort of economic separation from the state implied by neoliberalism does, to Foucault’s mind, offer something quite radically new, which the sort of analysis offered by Habermas and others failed to capture. As he suggested in a lecture of March 28, 1979:
The problematic of the economy is by no means the logical completion of the great problematic of sovereignty through which eighteenth century juridical-political thought strove to show how, by starting from individual subjects of natural right, one could arrive at the constitution of a political unity defined by the existence of an individual or collective sovereign who is the holder of part of the totality of these individual rights and at the same time the principle of their limitation. The economic problematic, the problematic of economic interest, is governed by a completely different configuration, by a completely different logic, type of reasoning, and rationality.128
Homo economicus is not homo juridicus. While the latter claims rights, the former says, you cannot touch me, you are powerless. Through that move, political economy has become the language of a critique of governmental reason. Economic science is “lateral to the art of governing.”129 By the time he had arrived at neoliberalism in his lectures, then, it had come to mean not a case of government forming a “counterpoint” between state and society, but a body of practices that has to “intervene” on society, or see the “regulation of society by the market.”130 Already in Röpke’s arguments, Foucault discerned this “shifting [of] the center of gravity of governmental action downwards,” culminating in a sort of enterprise society, with zones of deregulation in the spaces of particular cities and units as new sites of freedom, much as we might now think of Hong Kong for example.131 To grasp new ways of thinking about this sort of predicament, however, Foucault suggests we turn to someone like Max Weber for a sense of how to think about social “relations” and economic argument, or to what pioneering social democratic radicals like Franz Neumann termed the “economic constitution” under the modern Rechtsstaat.132
The lesson of neoliberalism that aligns with Foucault’s projects into the 1970s, therefore, seems to be its dethroning of the idea of a singular sovereign state. The very concept of the state has changed, for it is now “nothing else but the effect, the profile, the mobile shape of a perpetual statification or statifications in the sense of incessant transactions which modify or move, or drastically change, or insidiously shift sources of finance, modes of investment, decision-making letters, forms and types of control, relationships between local powers, the central authority, and so on.” The state “has no interior,” and one must undertake critical examination of it from the outside.133 Neoliberalism offered one such opportunity to examine the state anew, both from the outside and from within. By conceptualizing the global economy as the space upon which new discursive uncertainties would be played out, in an apparent rejection of a domestic politics of statification, neoliberal forms of biopolitics and governmentality can nevertheless only work if the domestic political resources of modern nation state are appropriately harnessed toward its ends.134 This means in turn that juridical and political tensions appear most openly at the margins of institutional connections, and traverse the border zones where statist politics and global economics meet.135 Those borders and hinterlands are precisely where Foucault urged us to look, and if there is something that still lives from his historically rooted critique of the present from the later 1970s, then it is surely this challenge to take up that task from the outside, as it were, and with considerable urgency, to reconsider the relationship between the nation state and global economic policy once more.
NOTES
* I am very grateful to the editors and organizers of the original conference where these themes were first discussed, and for comments on the draft itself to Michael Behrent and Greg Conti especially.
1. Michel Foucault, “En marge d’Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique,” (1961) “Preface” to Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Oeuvres, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), I, 664; cf. Serge Audier, Penser le “néoliberalisme”: Le moment néolibéral, Foucault et la crise du socialisme (Lormont: Le bord de l’eau, 2015), 65.
2. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2008), 22.
3. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire” (1971), Oeuvres, vol. 2, 1281–1304.
4. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1975), Oeuvres, vol. 2, 291; cf. 283.
5. Stuart Elden, Foucault’s Last Decade (Oxford: Polity, 2016), 208.
6. Michel Foucault, “L’archéologie du savoir” (1969), Oeuvres, vol. 2, 215, 216.
7. Michel Foucault, “L’ordre du discours,” Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970, Oeuvres, vol. 2, 256.
8. Foucault, “L’archéologie,” Oeuvres, vol. 2, 219, 222.
9. Michel Foucault, “Considérations sur le Marxisme, la phénoménologie et le pouvoir” (1978), Cités 4(52) (2012): 101–26.
10. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Vintage, 1970), 284f; Les mots et les choses (1966), Oeuvres, vol. 1, 1320; on Ricardo, 1311–58.
11. Ibid.
12. Michel Foucault, “La philosophie analytique de la politique” (1978), Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 1976–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 534–51, at 538.
13. Foucault, “Histoire de la folie,” Oeuvres, vol. 1, 582, 585, 590f.
14. Michel Foucault et al., “Table ronde—réclusion et capitalisme” (1972), Dits et écrits, vol. 1, 1965–1975 (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), 1205; cf. Michel Foucault, “La mort du père” (interview with P. Daix et al), Dits et écrits, vol. 1, 1602–07, at 1605.
15. Michel Foucault, “Pouvoir et corps” (1975), Dits et écrits, vol. 1, 1622–28, at p. 1624 cf. Michel Foucault, “Les têtes de la politique,” Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 1976–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), 9–13, at 9ff.
16. Unpublished interview between Michel Foucault and four militants of the LCR (July 1977): http://1libertaire.free.fr/MFoucault117.html.
17. Étienne Balibar, “L’anti-Marx de Michel Foucault,” in C. Laval and L. Paltrinieri, F. Taylan, eds., Marx & Foucault: Lectures, Usages, Confrontations (Paris: Découverte, 2015), 84–104, esp. 85, 87f, 90f, 94f.
18. See Elden, Foucault’s Last Decade; David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Vintage, 1995), 359ff.
19. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: Flamingo, 1993), 289.
20. Miller, Passion, 292–95.
21. Macey, Lives, 294f, 298.
22. Audier, Penser le néolibéralisme.
23. Michel Foucault, “La grille politique traditionnelle” (1978), Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 506f.
24. Foucault, Biopolitics, 178f, 191ff, 194ff.
25. Ibid., 188; cf. Audier, Penser le néolibéralisme, 53, 323.
26. Audier, Penser, 55, 351; cf. Raymond Aron “La politique Barre, ou quell autre,” La France, 3–9 March 1979, repr. De Giscard à Mitterand (Paris: Fallois, 2005), 316ff.
27. Peter Ghosh, “Citizen or Subject? Michel Foucault in the History of Ideas,” History of European Ideas 24(2) (1998): 113–59, at 115.
28. See Stefanos Geroulanos, Transparency in Postwar France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), esp. 300–14.
29. Ghosh, “Citizen or Subject?” 122.
30. Ibid., 125, 127.
31. Foucault, Biopolitics, 85, 88, 102ff; Macey, Lives, 392ff; Audier, Penser, 131.
32. Foucault, Biopolitics, 92.
33. Michel Foucault, “Omnes et singulatim: Towards a critique of political reason,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Stanford University, October 10–16, 1979), 253, translated as “pouvoir n’est pas une substance,” Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 979; cf. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 190ff.
34. Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, 393; Michel Foucault, “Va-t-on extruder Klaus Croissant?” Le nouvel observateur (November 1977), Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 361–65; cf. “Michel Foucault: la sécurité et l’État” (1977), Dits et écrits II, 383–88.
35. Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, 394.
36. Ibid., 395; Michel Foucault, “Désormais, la sécurité est au-dessus des lois,” interview with Jean Paul Kauffmann, Le Matin, November 18, 1977, 15, in Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 366–68.
37. Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, 397.
38. Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973, ed. B. Harcourt, trans. G. Burchell (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2015), 25–30. For his earlier genealogy of the punitive society and penal institutions, see Michael Behrent, “The Genealogy of Genealogy: Foucault’s 1970–1971 Course,” Foucault Studies 13 (2012): 157–78; also Bernard Harcourt, “Course Context,” in Foucault, Punitive Society, 265–310.
39. Richard Groulx, Michel Foucault, la politique comme guerre continué. De la guerre des races au racisme de l’état (Paris: Harmattan, 2015), 18.
40. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed., Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003), 258, 260.
41. Marianna Valverde, “Law versus History: Foucault’s Genealogy of Modern Sovereignty,” in M. Dillon and A. W. Neal, eds., Foucault on Politics, Security and the State (Basingtsoke: Macmillan, 2008), 135–50, at 142f; Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 57.
42. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 60ff.
43. Ibid., 81.
44. Cf. Quentin Skinner, “The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole” in N. McKendrick, ed., Historical Perspectives (London: Europa, 1974), 93–128.
45. Cf. Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce que les lumières?” (1984) Oeuvres, vol. 2, 1380–97 and notes; “What Is Enlightenment,” in P. Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (London: Penguin, 1984), 32–50.
46. Albert Hirschmann, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1985); Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 247.
47. Sheldon S. Wolin, “Democracy and the State: The Political and Theoretical Connections between Staatsräson and Wohlfahrtsstaatsräson,” Political Theory 15(4) (1987): 467–500, esp. 475, 480.
48. Foucault, Biopolitics, 39, 40.
49. See Jan-Otmar Hesse, “‘Der Mensch des Unternehmens und der Produktion’. Foucaults Sicht auf den Ordoliberalismus und die ‘Soziale Marktwirtschaft’,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 3 (2006): 291–96.
50. See Nicos Poulantzas, “A propos de l’impact populaire du fascisme,” in Eléments pour une analyse du fascisme, Seminar of Maria A. Macciocchi (Paris VIII: Vincennes, 1974–1975), 88–107; Audier, Penser, 133.
51. Audier, Penser, 76, 463f; cf. Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985).
52. Michel Foucault, “Non au sexe-roi,” Le nouvel observateur, 644, 12–21 March, 1977, in Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 256–69.
53. Foucault, “What Is Critique?”.
54. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 9.
55. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory and Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007), 276.
56. See Michel Foucault, “Questions à Michel Foucault sur la géographie” (1976), Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 32.
57. See 406. Michel Foucault, “I reportages di idee,” Corriere della sera, 12 November 1978, in Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 706ff; cf. Alain Finkielkraut, “La diversa Destra che viene dal Pacifico,” Corriere della sera, 12 November 1978, 1–2.
58. Focuault’s sense of not being a predictor of the future is there in his “La Rivolta dell’ Iran corre sui nastri delli minicassette” Corriere della Sera, 19 November 1978, 1, in Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 709–13, and discussion in Macey, Lives, 407.
59. Cf. Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
60. Cf. Michel Foucault, “Inutile de se soulever?” Le Monde, 11 May 1979, in Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 790–94; Audier, Penser, 418).
61. Foucault, L’archéologie, Oeuvres I, 253f; Michel Foucault, “Introduction par Michel Foucault” to G. Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological (1978), in Dits et écrits II, 429–42, at 431.
62. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 56.
63. Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (Oxford: Berghahn, 2004); “‘The Best Help I Could Find to Understand Our Present’: François Furet’s Antirevolutionary Reading of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,” in S. Sawyer and I. Stewart, eds., In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Anti-Totalitarianism, and Intellectual Politics in France since 1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), 85–110.
64. Foucault, “Non au sexe roi”; this was reiterated in another interview devoted to outlining his thoughts about neoliberalism, in Michel Foucault, “La phobie d’État,” Libération, 30 June/1 July 1984, 21.
65. Foucault, Biopolitics, 252f; Michael Behrent, “Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976-1979,” Modern Intellectual History 6(3) (2009): 539–68.
66. Daniel Zamora and Michael Behrent, eds., Foucault and Neoliberalism (Oxford: Polity, 2015); Daniel Zamora, “Finding a Left Governmentality: Foucault’s Last Decade,” in this volume.
67. Michael Behrent, “Can the Critique of Capitalism Be Anti-Humanist?,” History & Theory 54 (2015), 372–88, at 373ff; Serge Audier, “Neoliberalism through Foucault’s Eyes,” History & Theory 54 (2015): 404–18, at 406–10; cf. Foucault, Security, Territory, and Population, 66–73, 78f (25 January 1978).
68. Behrent, 375f; Foucault, Security, Territory, and Population, 81.
69. Behrent, “Critique,” 379, 381; Foucault, Biopolitics, 279.
70. Cf. Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen, State Phobia and Civil Society (Stanford, CA: California University Press, 2016), 140ff.
71. Foucault, Biopolitics, 55f.
72. Ibid., 58.
73. Ibid., 65.
74. Behrent, “Critique,” 385.
75. Audier, “Neoliberalism,” 406.
76. Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce que la critique? Critique et Aufklärung,” Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 84(2) (1990): 35–63 (original paper given at the Société française de philosophie, session of May 27, 1978), at 37; discussion in Audier, “Neoliberalism,” 407f. Translation available as Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?” trans. K. P. Geiman, in J. Schmidt, ed. What Is Enlightenment? (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996) 382–98, at 383f, 390ff.
77. Jan-Ottmar Hesse, Die Große Depression: Die Weltwirtschaftskrise 1929–1939 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014).
78. Audier, “Neoliberalism,” 411; cf. Thomas Willey, Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought, 1860–1914 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1978).
79. Foucault, Biopolitics, 190, 217, 324, 327.
80. Audier, “Neoliberalism,” 411.
81. Foucault, “La philosophie analytique,” Dits et écrits, vol. 2, esp. 536–39; Audier, “Neoliberalism,” 412; cf. Audier, Penser, 418.
82. Foucault, “Sexualité et pouvoir” (1978), Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 552–70, at 556f; cf. Foucault, “La philosophie analytique,” 542, 545.
83. Foucault, Biopolitics, 161ff, 163f, 169.
84. Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim,” 227, 228, 229; cf. Philippe Steiner, “Foucault, Weber, and the History of the Economic Subject,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 15(3) (2008): 503–27, here 512.
85. Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim,” 235.
86. Ibid., 252.
87. Foucault, Biopolitics, 246f.
88. Ibid., 173ff; more broadly and polemically, see Sonja Amadae, Prisoners of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
89. Foucault, Biopolitics, 136f, 147f, 177.
90. K. Steven Vincent, “Elie Halévy and French socialist liberalism,” History of European Ideas (2017). DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2016.1256588; Charles Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); cf. Henri Loyrette, ed., La famille Halévy 1760–1960: Entre théâtre et l’histoire (Paris: Fayard, 1996).
91. Michael Behrent, “Justifying Capitalism in an Age of Uncertainty: L’association pour la libérté économique et le progrès social, 1969–1973,” in E. Chabal (ed.), France since the 1970s (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 176–94, esp. 178f.
92. Cf. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Great Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
93. François Bilger, La pensée économique libérale dans l’Allemagne contemporaine (Paris: R. Pichon & R. Durand-Auzias, 1964); for discussion, Tribe, “Political Economy of Modernity,” esp. 688ff; Audier, Penser, 305–09.
94. Foucault, “La philosophie analytique,” Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 550f.
95. Foucault, Biopolitics, 116.
96. Ibid., 197f.
97. Ibid., 103f; cf. 125, 109, 106, 241f.
98. Serge Audier, “The French Reception of American Neo-Liberalism in the Late 1970s,” In Search of the Liberal Moment, 167–91, esp. 168ff, 179ff; see also Keith Tribe, “The Political Economy of Modernity: Foucault’s Collège de France lectures of 1978 and 1979,” Economy and Society 38(4) (2009): 679–98, 690f; and for the original text, Henri Lepage, Demain le capitalisme (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1978).
99. Cf. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le capitalisme utopiqe (Paris: Seuil, 1979); La crise de l’état providence (Paris: Seuil, 1981); Counter-Democracy, trans. A. Goldhammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
100. Cf. Blandine Barret-Kriegel, L’état et les ésclaves (Paris: Payot et Rivages, 1979).
101. Foucault, “La philosophie analytique,” Dits et écrits II, 541.
102. Audier, “Neoliberalism,” 412; André Orléan, “Mimetic Contagion and Speculative Bubbles,” Theory and Decision 27 (1989): 63–92.
103. Michel Foucault, “Une mobilisation culturelle,” Le Nouvel Observateur (670) (1977): 49: http://referentiel.nouvelobs.com/archives_pdf/OBS0670_19770912/OBS0670_19770912_049.pdf.
104. Audier, “Neoliberalism,” 414; cf. Michel Foucault, “The Gay Science,” trans. N. Morar and D. W. Smith, Critical Inquiry 37(3) (2011): 385–403.
105. Audier, “Neoliberalism,” 414f; Michel Foucault, “La société disciplinaire en crise,” May 12, 1978, Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 532ff.
106. Foucault, Biopolitics, 251; cf. Behrent, “Liberalism without Humanism,” 559.
107. Foucault, L’archéologie, Oeuvres I, 175, 182; “What Is Critique,” 394.
108. Ibid., 185, 186.
109. Ibid., 215f, 219, 222.
110. Ibid., 1452, n. 10.
111. François Châtelet, Les conceptions politiques du XXe siècle (Paris: PUF, 1981), 982f, 1023f, 1025; cf. Stephen Sawyer, “Epilogue: Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Democratic Theory,” Liberal Moment, 191–215, at 194ff.
112. Behrent, “Liberalism without Humanism,” 556f.
113. Foucault, Biopolitics, 247ff.
114. Michel Rocard, Parler Vrai (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 76-85, esp. 79f; see also Audier, “French Reception,” in Liberal Moment, 173, 175, 179; Audier, Penser, 135.
115. Sawyer, “Epilogue,” Liberal Moment, 198, 202f; on Sartre, Algeria and the epuration, see the interesting analysis by Patrick Baert, The Existentialist Moment (Oxford: Polity, 2016), 139, 151, 184.
116. Rosanvallon, La crise, 94f, 183f.
117. Discussion in Matthew G. Hannah, “Foucault’s ‘German Moment’: Genealogy of a Disjuncture,” Foucault Studies 13 (2012): 116–37, at 120, 133.
118. François Ewald, “Omnes et Singulatim, after Risk,” Carceral Notebooks 7 (2011): 77–107, at 78, 86, 100.
119. Cf. Bernard Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
120. Foucault, Biopolitics, 66.
121. Audier, Penser, 306.
122. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (March 17, 1976), 261.
123. Michel Foucault, “Resumé” of Security, Territory, and Population, Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 538.
124. Foucault, Biopolitics, 68f.
125. cf. Foucault, Surveiller et punir, Oeuvres, vol. 2, 495, 500f.
126. Foucault, Biopolitics, 67, 195; cf. Rosanvallon, La crise, 69f.
127. Ibid., 70–76.
128. Ibid., 282.
129. Ibid., 286.
130. Ibid. (February 14, 1979), 145.
131. Ibid., 148, 150.
132. Ibid., 163 (February 21, 1979), also 147f, where he says Weber, Sombart, and Schumpeter “support the neoliberal analysis or project,” and 167. Cf. Keith Tribe, Strategies of Economic Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Duncan Kelly, “Rethinking Franz Neumann’s Route to Behemoth,” History of Political Thought 23(3) (2002): 458–96.
133. Foucault, Biopolitics, 77f.
134. See here also Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), esp. chaps. 2–3.
135. Foucault, Biopolitics, 169ff, 173–77.